Streamlining Management of Multiple Cloud Services

Abstract

With the increase in the number of cloud services and service providers, manual analysis of Service Level Agreements (SLA), comparison between different service offerings and conformance regulation has become a difficult task for customers. Cloud SLAs are policy documents describing the legal agreement between cloud providers and customers. SLA specifies the commitment of availability, performance of services, penalties associated with violations and procedure for customers to receive compensations in case of service disruptions. The aim of our research is to develop technology solutions for automated cloud service management using Semantic Web and Text Mining techniques. In this paper we discuss in detail the challenges in automating cloud services management and present our preliminary work in extraction of knowledge from SLAs of different cloud services. We extracted two types of information from the SLA documents which can be useful for end users. First, the relationship between the service commitment and financial credit. We represented this information by enhancing the existing Cloud service ontology proposed by us in our previous research. Second, we extracted rules in the form of obligations and permissions from SLAs using modal and deontic logic formalizations. For our analysis, we considered six publicly available SLA documents from different cloud computing service providers.